Plagiarism and Collaboration: Suggestions
for “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The
WPA Statement on Best Practices”
Amy Martin
Plagiarism is a perennial concern of professors across the curriculum who
assign any amount of writing in their classes.1 However, as Henry Wilson
notes in a chapter of Lise Buranen and Alice Roy’s Perspectives on Plagiarism
and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World, institutional statements
on plagiarism are often vague or nonexistent, leaving students and faculty
confused about what behaviors constitute plagiarism (211–18). In the same
volume, Edward White chastises institutions that do not recognize the complexity of plagiarism:
I get weary of self-righteous professors and administrators fulminating against immoral student plagiarists, when the institutions they represent and whose policies they shape have
not taken the trouble to provide the information and guidance students need to avoid plagiarism. Indeed, we should
all expect that much plagiarism will naturally occur unless
we help students understand what all the fuss is about; many
students simply are clueless about the issue and many faculty
think the issue is simpler than it is. (207)
White goes on to note that as most colleges have a freshman composition requirement, a ready-made venue exists for instructing students about
plagiarism. Yet he also states that such instruction must be reinforced by
instructors of courses across the curriculum, or else students will fail to
understand plagiarism or take it seriously as a universal academic offense.
In initiating discussions about plagiarism and plagiarism policies with
their own faculty and with administrators and faculty across the curriculum,
WPAs have an important document to support them—The Council of Writing Program Administrators’ “Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA
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Statement on Best Practices.” The WPA statement defines plagiarism: “In
an instructional setting, plagiarism occurs when a writer deliberately uses
someone else’s language, ideas, or other original (not common-knowledge)
material without acknowledging its source” (1). The statement notes that
most plagiarism discussions do not account for the fact that students may
misuse or incorrectly cite sources in the course of their research-based writing. By extension, students who fail to cite or document sources correctly
and who nevertheless make some attempt to acknowledge their sources have
not plagiarized because their actions are not a deliberate attempt to mislead
(2). In addition to outlining the responsibilities of students, faculty, and
administrators regarding plagiarism, the statement offers suggestions for
classroom practices that make plagiarism difficult, including discussing the
conventions of different genres and disciplines with students with regards to
writing and citation use (6).
Although WPAs and writing faculty have the WPA statement to support
them, initiating discussions of plagiarism on college campuses can be difficult when faculty and administration are not unanimously invested in the
value of writing across the curriculum and may hold definitions of and attitudes toward plagiarism that are as disparate as their academic disciplines,
particularly when the issue is seen in terms of the value of collaboration in
research and writing. In this essay, I will show the various definitions of collaboration that exist across disciplines at one college that had no plagiarism
policy.2 I will also discuss the implications of these definitions for WPAs who
may be relying on the WPA plagiarism statement to guide them and their
institutions as they attempt to define plagiarism across the curriculum.
T S   P
To determine their definitions of plagiarism, I gave faculty at a small
Catholic college (“SCC”) a survey adapted from one designed by Phillip
Marzluf, formerly of the University of Oklahoma. The survey asked instructors to rank nine hypothetical writing scenarios along an ethical continuum
from “completely unethical” to “not plagiarism,” categories which were then
abstracted during analysis into the three categories of “unethical,” “ethical,” and “not plagiarism.”3 Faculty members received the surveys through
campus mail, and I instructed them in an accompanying letter to return
the surveys to me by a specified date. To protect subjects’ anonymity, the
survey instrument requested that instructors identify themselves only by
their academic disciplines. For the purposes of analysis, I categorized faculty
responses by disciplinary affiliation and placed them into one of three cat-
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egories: humanities, social sciences or sciences.4 By the end of the semesterlong period of data collection, twenty-eight of sixty-eight full-time professors had responded to the survey.
W-T C
Four scenarios in the survey feature students working with text within
and outside the traditional research paradigm of incorporating sources into
their work. For example, in scenario 1, Kathy develops her own text using
her friend’s text on a similar subject as a source. However, we do not know
within the context of the scenario whether or not Kathy acknowledged her
friend’s paper as a research source. The SCC faculty as a whole clearly made
a distinction between Kathy interacting with her friend’s text versus Kathy
interacting with her friend through conversation while writing her English
115 paper; a majority of faculty across all disciplines rated Kathy’s interaction with her friend’s text as unethical, with 100 percent of social science
faculty rating this scenario as such. Similarly, a strong majority of faculty
across all disciplines rated scenario 5, in which Cody neglects to cite the
author of the analysis of The Tempest on which he bases his analysis of King
Lear, as unethical; scenarios 1, 5 and 9 (in the last of these, a student purchases a paper from the Internet) were the only scenarios that all professors
rated as “unethical.”
Cody and Kathy are not collaborating with other people but are using
the texts other people have produced—a sort of collaboration once removed.
With the invention of the printing press (and the mass market ability to publish writings that followed) putting a premium on the originality of ideas,
the unacknowledged use of another’s ideas—both within and outside the
academy—became a punishable crime.5 Therefore, in academia, when students fail to acknowledge the ideas of others, they can suffer what Rebecca
Howard terms the “academic death penalty,” expulsion from school (“Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty” 789). In the case of faculty,
the unacknowledged use of another’s ideas can result in another type of academic death penalty—denial of tenure and subsequent loss of employment.6
Given the severe academic penalties involved in participating in behavior
similar to that of Kathy and Cody, the SCC faculty’s strong response to their
scenarios is not surprising.
However, given the emphasis that academia puts on originality, faculty responses to scenario 2 appear somewhat anomalous. In this scenario,
Michael closely paraphrases and cites, albeit inappropriately, a passage from
The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia. That is, according to Howard, Michael
patchwrites (Standing xviii). While there has been considerable resistance to
patchwriting in both popular culture and academia, SCC faculty appear
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to be more receptive to the concept.7 For example, all science faculty viewed
Michael’s behavior as either ethical or “not plagiarism,” and 63 percent of
humanities and 80 percent of social science faculties accepted Michael’s patchwriting.
The research of Miguel Roig suggests that although patchwriting has been
maligned in academia, Michael may be writing according to models set forth
by faculty. Roig, writing from the field of psychology, posits that professors
“from certain disciplines, such as English, have stricter criteria for paraphrasing than professors from the hard sciences, such as chemistry and biology,
and these [more relaxed] writing practices are somehow conveyed to students”
(310).8 Roig conducted two studies to gauge professors’ paraphrasing criteria:
one study asked professors to compare original paragraphs to paraphrases, and
the second study asked professors to paraphrase paragraphs themselves. Roig
discovered that not only did professors’ criteria for plagiarism vary within
disciplines, but their ability to paraphrase was discipline-dependent, too. He
notes that professors whose fields are different from that of the source text
that they were asked to paraphrase may have felt forced to patchwrite (to use
Howard’s term) “to stay as close as possible to the original language to avoid
conveying inaccurate information” (319). At the end of his article, Roig issues
a call to action of sorts, noting that professors and administrators should turn
their attention to the fact that “substantial differences” exist in the definition
of plagiarism across and within disciplines (321). In light of Roig’s study, the
acceptance by SCC faculty—with the exception the English department—
seems less an anomaly and more a product of the confusion that even professors seem to face when confronted with the questions of what constitutes
appropriate paraphrasing and what constitutes plagiarism.9
Further evidence of faculty acceptance of patchwriting is also evident
in their mostly positive responses to scenario 8, involving Lynn’s imitation of
Catcher in the Rye. Howard categorizes patchwriting as a form of mimesis, “a
process of evaluating a source text, selecting passages pertinent to the patchwriter’s purposes, and transporting those passages to the patchwriter’s new context” (Standing xviii). In scenario 8, Lynn uses words and short phrases from
Catcher in the Rye as she attempts to imitate the tone of the book in an essay
for her composition course. The last line of the scenario suggests that Lynn
is quite aware that while she wants to interact with and imitate the text, she
also needs to be “careful” to avoid plagiarism. The tension that Lynn apparently feels about avoiding plagiarism in this circumstance reflects the shifting
attitudes toward mimesis throughout history. While mimesis has little place in
the contemporary academy that valorizes the individual and originality, Howard reminds us that mimesis has at times held sway in Western culture, most
notably during the Middle Ages (Standing 64–66). The medieval concept of
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mimesis is what Howard seeks to recover in her separation of patchwriting
from plagiarism and is what best explains the interaction between Lynn and
the text of Catcher in the Rye:
A common contemporary response to patchwriting focuses on
appropriation—the patchwriter’s appropriation of the source.
From this perspective, patchwriting is theft, a criminal act. But
medieval textual theory reminds us that patchwriting’s merger
of self is bi-directional: The patchwriter is acknowledging his
writing persona as entailed rather than autonomous, and he is
acknowledging the authority of the source text. (66)
In other words, Lynn’s patchwriting shows her indebtedness to the source
text that helps her establish the persona she wants to get across to her English
instructor, behavior that not only English instructors but their colleagues
across the curriculum at SCC found acceptable.
While faculty had little problem with Lynn and Michael’s patchwriting,
only humanities faculty viewed scenario 4 as either “ethical” or “not plagiarism”; in it, Sandra cites direct quotations but not facts “such as names,
dates, statistics, and geographical facts” (Appendix) in a paper on the Vietnam War. While no specific information is given about the discipline for
which Sandra writes her paper (although, given the subject matter, one
could assume she is writing for a social science or humanities course), this
scenario turns on a question that composition teachers often hear from students learning how to cite sources: “What counts as a fact?” As Margaret
Price notes in her article “Beyond ‘Gotcha!’: Situating Plagiarism in Policy
and Pedagogy,” the definitions of such concepts normally associated with
plagiarism—terms such as “fact,” “common knowledge,” “collaboration,”
and “ownership”—shift across time, discourse communities, and cultural
contexts. To borrow an example from Price’s article to illustrate, most of us
accept as fact the mathematical equation 2 + 2 = 4; however, faculty whose
primary discipline is mathematics would know that 2 + 2 = 4 only if one is
dealing with a Base-10 mathematical system. In other words, “facts are facts
because they behave relatively stably within a given context, not because
they possess inherent stability” (92). When faculty respond to Sandra’s citation practices, they do so through the lens of their respective disciplines’
perspectives about notions of fact and common knowledge, although that
lens can be somewhat murky. For example, the MLA Handbook for Writers
of Research Papers states that writers have plagiarized if they have “presented
facts without saying where [they] found them” (75); elements that do not
have to be cited are familiar proverbs, well-known quotations, and “common knowledge,” yet “you must indicate the source of any information or
material that you took from someone else” (73). The Publication Manual
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of the American Psychological Association offers its associated disciplines no
more guidance regarding facts and common knowledge than does the MLA,
noting that exact quotes and paraphrases should be cited and that a writer
should not “present the work of another as if it were his or her own work.
This can extend to ideas as well as written words” (293–294). Given that the
publication manuals have such general statements on what constitutes fact
and common knowledge, and given the shifting nature of facts and common
knowledge across time, community, and context, a consensus on whether
Sandra is plagiarizing would be hard to come by, indeed.
C  P
Collaboration by writers, whether in the workplace or academia, is certainly not a new concept. Yet as several composition scholars, among them
Andrea Lunsford, Lisa Ede, and Karen Burke LeFevre, have pointed out,
collaboration in composition studies has often meant collaboration as peer
responses to a text a student has produced in isolation (Ede and Lunsford 7;
LeFevre 13–22). Even in the sciences, where teams of researchers working
and writing together on projects are more the rule than the exception, tension exists between individual and corporate ownership of a research project
and the writing that reports that research.10
The tension between collaboration and individual ownership in writing is evident in the responses of the SCC faculty to the three scenarios (3,
6, and 7) that deal with a student interacting with another with regard to
his or her writing. While a majority of faculty across disciplines agreed that
Lynsay behaved unethically in receiving editing help from her mother, a former English teacher (scenario 6), Frank’s behavior during his peer response
session (scenario 7) and John’s behavior in turning to his girlfriend to help
him with a conclusion to his English 115 paper (scenario 3) produced varied
responses across disciplines.11 While science faculty viewed John’s behavior
as clearly unethical, humanities and social science faculty were less convinced of John’s transgression. And while science faculty also viewed Frank’s
behavior as unethical, humanities faculty viewed his behavior as ethical;
social science faculty rode the fence (Appendix).
While the SCC science faculty may value collaboration in their own professional writings, they regard any form of collaboration in their students’
writings with suspicion. On the other hand, survey respondents from the
humanities are more receptive to the idea of collaboration in writing—except
in Lynsay’s case. A possible explanation for the humanities faculty’s response
to these three scenarios lies in the particulars of the survey respondents.
Of the humanities faculty who responded to the survey, nearly half were
members of the English department, all of whom have taught the required
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freshman composition courses at one time or another. If the scenario that
features Frank also featured a description of what may take place during a
peer response session in the typical composition classroom, the English professors would be more likely to rate Frank’s behavior as ethical and rate the
two “out-of-class” scenarios as unethical or state mixed responses to Frank’s
decisions. One English professor made comments on the survey that may
explain why she thought her colleagues would view Frank’s behavior as ethical but Lynsay’s behavior as unethical:
My biggest problem with Lynsay’s behavior isn’t so much that
she goes to her mother for peer response, but that her mother is
an English teacher. That seems to give her an unfair advantage
over other students. And it’s a shame because what she’s doing,
seeking out feedback to her work, is what we seem to want to
encourage in writing classes.
In other words, this teacher is happy that Lynsay is seeking feedback
on her writing beyond the confines of the classroom. However, Lynsay has
access to someone with more expertise in proofreading than her fellow students, which pushes her behavior into the realm of the unethical for this
particular teacher.
Lynsay, however, not only has access to someone with additional expertise, but that someone, if one looks at the language of the scenario closely, is
also appropriating her text. Lynsay and her mother are not engaging in “peer
response,” as suggested by the comments of the teacher quoted above. Her
mother “reworks” her papers, leaving ideas alone but inserting words and
altering punctuation. In other words, she is acting as Lynsay’s editor rather
than her responder, giving Lynsay assistance beyond what her fellow students
could expect from fellow classmates and even from writing tutors, should
they take the same assignment to SCC’s Academic Resource Center.12 Likewise, when John’s girlfriend summarizes his paper and he writes that summary verbatim as his conclusion, she may have given him more assistance
(or perhaps John has taken more assistance, since we do not know if she is
present when John writes out her words) than John would have received had
he gone for a tutoring session. We do not know enough about John’s girlfriend (Is she an English major? Has she taken many writing courses?) to
know how “expert” her summary of John’s paper is compared to the editing
done by Lynsay’s mother.
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O P F A
While all faculty agreed that a student purchasing a paper from the Internet (scenario 9) is plagiarism, the other hypothetical scenarios dealing with
collaboration in its various permutations proved more problematic in terms
of defining what behaviors constitute plagiarism. So how does an institution
formulate its plagiarism policy?
While the WPA plagiarism statement explicitly addresses responsibilities
of students, faculty, and staff with regard to the use of sources in writing, the
statement offers individual departments and their institutions little guidance
on how to address collaboration. While the statement consistently notes that
academic writing conventions vary between and within disciplines—and
so definitions of plagiarism will vary between and within disciplines—the
statement does not explicitly address definitions of acceptable person-to-person collaboration other than noting that faculty should include “support for
researched writing (such as the analysis of models, individual/group conferences, or peer review) into course designs” (3, emphasis added). In the “Best
Practices” section, under “Explain Plagiarism and Develop Clear Policies,”
the WPA statement does include the following passage about collaborating
with the written work of others: “Remind students that the goal of research
is to engage, through writing, in a purposeful, scholarly discussion of issues
that are sometimes passed over in daily life. Understanding, augmenting,
engaging in dialogue with, and challenging the work of others are part of
becoming an effective citizen in a complex society” (4). Overall, however, the
WPA statement offers little guidance to WPAs or to their colleagues across
disciplines concerning acceptable collaboration within academic fields.
Revising the WPA statement to define every allowable and unallowable
instance of collaboration would be impractical (that is, saying “Editing from
your retired English teacher mother is not allowed; however, using words
and ideas obtained during a peer response session in your composition class
is acceptable.”); however, including more specific language about what constitutes allowable collaboration would assist WPAs in setting the boundaries
for plagiarism at their institutions and assist colleagues across disciplines in
viewing writing as a social process. In Henry Wilson’s 1999 study of college
plagiarism policies, 63 percent of schools surveyed had plagiarism policies
that did not address issues of collaboration (213). While these institutions
have policies that go beyond simple admonitions not to plagiarize, that their
policies do not define what constitutes acceptable collaboration may be just
as harmful as having no plagiarism policy at all. Wilson notes:
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When students engage in such composition strategies as peer
editing and tutoring—which are increasingly presented as
essential collaborative writing strategies—blanket prohibition against “using the words or thoughts of others” can plant
unwarranted suspicion in the minds of both teachers and students that something untoward may be occurring in their writing activities, even if these activities consist of the entirely ethical application of collaborative writing techniques. (215)
At the relatively few schools in Wilson’s study that have plagiarism policies addressing both plagiarism and collaboration, the lengthy and detailed
policies “tend to work from a specific theoretical viewpoint, one that explicitly acknowledges that writing is inevitably a socially based process” (216).
Many of these policies do not use the term “collaboration” but instead refer
to writing center tutoring or peer response as acts that are encouraged and
that do not constitute plagiarism.
I would argue that the WPA statement, which at seven pages is already
lengthy, should be further lengthened to guide WPAs, our students, and
our colleagues across disciplines about the boundaries of acceptable personto-person collaboration—no easy feat, considering the responses regarding
acceptable collaboration that emerged from my study of faculty across the
curriculum in one small college. However, regardless of whether an institution has a WAC program, the differences in the interpretations of acceptable
collaboration in writing point to a need for those of us in composition to
continue or perhaps initiate discussions of plagiarism and collaboration with
instructors in other fields. Although Lise Buranen writes about interpretations of plagiarism across cultures, her call to action applies to issues related
to plagiarism and collaboration with our colleagues from different academic
“cultures”:
[W]e must recognize, acknowledge, and continue our research
and inquiry into the complexities and nuances of what we call
plagiarism, while at the same time taking care not to send
overly simplistic or conflicting messages to students, no matter who they are. We need to keep investigating, for instance,
where we believe collaboration in the classroom ends and “plagiarism” begins, even if—or especially if—there are no easy
answers to that question. (72)
To further Buranen’s point, we need to investigate what constitutes
acceptable collaboration outside the classroom setting as well and to invite
our colleagues across the curriculum to engage in these investigations with
us.
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Just as writing teachers—particularly those who teach freshman composition—frequently shoulder most of the burden of teaching college students
about plagiarism, WPAs frequently shoulder the burden of advising an entire
faculty about classroom practices that can avoid plagiarism. WPAs should
be supported in this endeavor by a document that recognizes the complexities of appropriately incorporating sources into writing and recognizes the
various conventions for collaboration that exist across disciplines and outside
traditional classroom settings.
N
1
An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York City on March
21, 2003. I would like to thank the students and faculty at SCC who generously
donated their time to this project and Phillip Marzluf for his permission to use and
alter his original survey.
2
The institution under study has an academic integrity policy that forbids
plagiarism (in addition to other dishonest practices, such as presenting false data
and giving and receiving information on tests). The policy, however, does not
define for students and faculty what acts constitute plagiarism. Required composition courses at this institution use Diana Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference as a standard
text. Hacker defines plagiarism as “(1) failing to cite quotations and borrowed ideas,
(2) failing to enclose borrowed language in quotation marks, and (3) failing to put
summaries and paraphrases in your own words” (331). While all sections of composition courses use A Writer’s Reference, no data exist to show whether students in
these courses are specifically assigned to read Hacker’s definition of plagiarism.
3
Survey respondents were advised to mark as “not plagiarism” scenarios
which they felt no one under any circumstances would interpret as plagiarism.
Respondents were directed to mark as “completely ethical” scenarios which they
personally viewed as ethical but could foresee a situation in which another person
might interpret the situation as plagiarism—in other words, the respondent felt
that his/her personal ethical view of the scenario could be different from that of
someone else interpreting the same situation.
4 .SCC
defines humanities disciplines as the following: English, fine arts,
history, modern foreign languages, philosophy, and religious studies. Biology,
chemistry, health and human services, mathematics and computer science, and
nursing constitute the sciences, while business, communications, psychology, sociology, and teacher education are considered social science disciplines at SCC. The
humanities had the most survey participants (11) while the sciences had the fewest
(7).
5
For a more detailed discussion of the invention of the printing press and its
impact on intellectual property, see Elizabeth Eisenstein and Mark Rose.
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6 Thomas Mallon’s Stolen Words devotes a chapter to a discussion of the “undo-
ing” (151) of a Texas Tech University history professor because of plagiarism.
7
Howard detailed the criticisms in popular media and academia to her publications on patchwriting in a conference presentation entitled “Public Intellectual,
or Public Object? Mass Media Representations of Plagiarism Scholarship.”
8
Note that the SCC humanities faculty, composed primarily of English
professors, had the highest number of “unethical” responses in this portion of the
study, supporting Roig’s hypothesis.
9 Ironically, in paraphrasing Howard’s discussion of patchwriting, Roig
misrepresents her position. Throughout “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism,” which Roig cites as a reference, Howard argues that although patchwriting
is “customarily regarded as a subset of the category of plagiarism” (89), it should be
regarded instead as indicative of students’ attempts to enter an academic discourse
community, rather than as a transgressive act.
10
See, for example, the discussion of the human genome project research in
Andrea Lunsford and Susan West, “Intellectual Property and Composition Studies.”
11
English 115 (ENGL 115) is SCC’s required composition course.
12
For a concise discussion of asking questions during tutoring sessions and
the difference between tutoring and editing, see Paula Gillespie and Neal Learner.
A
Assessments of Plagiarism Scenarios
1. Kathy is having difficulty finding a suitable writing topic for her final
ENGL 115 paper. After discussing her problems with a friend, she finds out that
her friend had to write a similar paper the previous semester. Using a draft of her
friend’s paper, Kathy rewrites it to make it sound more like herself. Also, she completely changes her friend’s introduction and, in the body of the paper, includes
some additional information.
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
Unethical
91%
72%
100%
Ethical
--29%
---
Not Plagiarism
-------
No Response
9%
-----
______
Note: The percentages given in these tables do not always equal 100% for a variety of
reasons.
2. In The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, Michael looks up some
information on occupational disease for a paper and finds the
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following summary:Occupational disease, illness resulting from the
conditions or environment of employment. Some time usually elapses
between exposure to the cause and development of the symptoms
of an occupational disease. Among the causes of such diseases are
toxic chemicals, such as benzene and dioxin. In a paper for his business
communications class, Michael includes the following:Occupational disease
is an illness resulting from job-related conditions. Usually, there is an elapse
of time between exposure to the cause and development of the symptoms
of this disease. Toxic chemicals, such as benzene and dioxin are common
causes (The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia).
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
Unethical
36%
--20%
Ethical
18%
43%
30%
Not Plagiarism
45%
57%
50%
No Response
-------
3. John hates writing conclusions. Thus, instead of summarizing the
paper himself, he reads his sociology paper aloud to his girlfriend and
then asks her to briefly sum up the paper. He writes down exactly what
she says and, after making a couple of grammatical changes, he includes
this at the end of his paper.
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
Unethical
Ethical
54%
71%
50%
36%
29%
40%
Not
Plagiarism
9%
--10%
No Response
-------
4. Sandra, a student writing about the Vietnam War, has collected over ten
separate newspaper accounts depicting an important battle in preparation
for a lengthy research paper. As she writes her description about this
battle, she makes sure to include proper citations whenever she uses direct
quotations from the newspaper articles. However, she doesn’t cite the
sources of facts such as names, dates, statistics, and geographical places.
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
Unethical
Ethical
18%
43%
60%
36%
57%
20%
Not
Plagiarism
36%
--10%
No Response
9%
--10%
5. The assignment in Cody’s English class asks to write a three-page
interpretation of a Shakespeare play. Glancing through a book about
Shakespeare, Elizabethan Playwrights, Cody finds an analysis of The
Tempest that he likes. Cody then extends the analysis to write his
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paper on Shakespeare’s King Lear. Although he cites the Shakespeare
anthology he is using, he doesn’t indicate his use of Elizabethan
Playwrights.
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
Unethical
90%
85%
80%
Ethical
9%
14%
10%
Not Plagiarism
-------
No Response
----10%
6. In her opinion, Lynsay feels that she has a lot to say but at the same
time feels she can never find the right words to express her thoughts. All
her sentences are always the same length and start in the same way. Her
mother, fortunately, is a retired high school English teacher. She reworks
Lynsay’s papers until they sound more professional and academic.
“She only touches the grammar, and stuff like words and punctuation,”
Lynsay says. “The ideas are mine. That’s the important part.”
Ethical
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
82%
57%
80%
18%
28%
20%
Not
Plagiarism
-------
No Response
-------
7. In Frank’s ENGL 115 class, multiple drafting and soliciting responses
to and editing of those drafts are requirements of the class; students
work in groups during class time to respond to and edit each other’s
papers. Frank’s usual partners, Erica and Gail, are recognized as the best
students in the class; therefore, Frank feels that rewriting the final drafts
of his papers and including the exact words and sentence structures
that they suggest would be in his best interest. Incorporating their exact
words and sentences structures is especially easy, since the instructor
tells students to write, in a different color ink, directly on their group
members’ rough drafts.
Ethical
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
36%
72%
50%
45%
29%
30%
Not
Plagiarism
9%
--20%
No Response
9%
-----
8. Lynn’s favorite book in high school was The Catcher in the Rye. She
liked the smart-alecky tone of the book and how the main character’s
thoughts were depicted with mild swears and informal phrases. The
first sentence of this book, for example, reads, “If you really want to
hear all about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I
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© Council of Writing Program Administrators
WPA 28.3 (Spring 2005)
was born…and all of that David Copperfield kind of crap.” In her first
paper for ENGL 115, a description of a real experience from her past,
Lynn tried to imitate the tone of The Catcher in the Rye. Yet, though she
wanted to make herself sound like the main character from that book,
she was careful to only directly use single words or short, two-to-three
word phrases.
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
Unethical
18%
--40%
Ethical
36%
86%
20%
Not Plagiarism
45%
14%
40%
No Response
-------
9. Ashley, a chemistry major, finds out that her final history paper is
due on the following day. Since there is no time left to do research and
plan her topic—and since she still has to study for her final chemistry
exam—she can think of only one solution to her problem; she jumps on
the Internet, finds the www.collegepapers.com site, and pays $42.50 to
download what is advertised as “the perfect paper.”
Humanities
Sciences
Social Sciences
Unethical
Ethical
100%
100%
100%
-------
Not
Plagiarism
-------
No Response
-------
W C
Buranen, Lise. “‘But I Wasn’t Cheating’: Plagiarism and Cross-Cultural Mythology.” Buranen and Roy 63–74.
Buranen, Lise, and Alice M. Roy, eds. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual
Property in a Postmodern World. Albany: SUNY P, 1999.
“Defining and Avoiding Plagiarism: The WPA Statement on Best Practices.” (
Southern Illinois UP, 1990.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications
and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1979.
Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York:
MLA, 2003.
Gillespie, Paula and Neal Learner. The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Peer Tutoring. 2nd
ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004.
Hacker, Diana. A Writer’s Reference. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2003.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. “The New Abolitionism Comes to Plagiarism.” Buranen
and Roy 87–95.
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Martin / Plagiarism and Collaboration
“Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty.” College English 57
(1995): 788–806.
“Public Intellectual, or Public Object? Mass Media Representations of Plagiarism
Scholarship.” Intellectual Property Caucus. College Composition and Communication Caucus. New York Hilton and Towers, New York City. 19 Mar. 2003.
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Standing in the Shadow of Giants: Plagiarists, Authors, Collaborators. Stamford, CT:
Ablex, 1999.
Lagassé, Paul, ed. The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1994: 637.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention as a Social Act. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,
1987.
Lunsford, Andrea, and Susan West. “Intellectual Property and Composition Studies.” College Composition and
Communication 47 (1996): 383–411.
Mallon, Thomas. Stolen Words: The Classic Book on Plagiarism. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.
Marzluf, Phillip. “Cheats and Copycats: Ethical Attitudes of Students and their Instructors toward Plagiarism.” Conference on College Composition and Communication. Adam’s Mark Hotel, Denver. 16 Mar. 2001.
Price, Margaret. “Beyond ‘Gotcha!’: Situating Plagiarism in Policy and Pedagogy.”
College Composition and Communication 54.1 (2002): 88–115.
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. 5th ed. Washington,
DC: APA, 2001.
Roig, Miguel. “Plagiarism and Paraphrasing Criteria of College and University Professors.” Ethics and Behavior 11.3 (2001): 307–21.
Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1993.
White, Edward M. “Student Plagiarism as an Institutional and Social Issue.”
Buranen and Roy 205–10.
Wilson, Henry L. “When Collaboration Becomes Plagiarism: The Administrative
Perspective.” Buranen and Roy 211–18.
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WPA 28.3 (Spring 2005)
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© Council of Writing Program Administrators